How Disney Creates a Premium User Experience Leadership Lessons from Disney

All right, so how on earth, you tell me, can you convince a 21-year-old to sweep up trash in the blazing hot Florida sun for 8 hours a day and convince them that the low pay and the crappy job is all going to be worth it because it's going to contribute to their overall career path? Well, there's only one way you can make that happen, and that's employer branding and branding in general. And that's top of mind for me because I was just in Disney last week and I witnessed this firsthand where there are these highly educated college students that are looking for the next step in their career and they're working concession stands and sweeping up trash and just sweating their butts off in the Florida sun. And so I'm going to share today a few things that I observed while I was in Disney. How they create such a great experience for their guests. Uh, but I'm also going to share some notes from— I did the Disney Leadership Institute a couple years ago, and I've got some great, uh, nuggets from, from the handouts that I received there and from the education I received there that I thought would be valuable to all the leaders listening to this podcast. So hang in there, we're going to check all this out. Let's get going. All right. So one of the things that they're very adamant about in Disney, if you've never been to Disney, it's a fantastic example of a great business just in the high level of detail, attention to detail that they show in everything they do. It's incredibly experiential. I had an amazing time. I'm recording this on May 4th. May the 4th be with you. They recently rolled out a Star Wars park inside of, um, I don't know which one it was, Hollywood Studios maybe. Yeah, Hollywood Studios. And it is incredible. The level of attention to detail down to literally the, um, the handrails when you're waiting in line are made to look like you are in the Disney or the Star Wars scene, uh, that you're, you're walking into for the ride. And so every little thing is made to make you feel and look and appear like you are in something bigger than just a theme park. And so, I attended the Disney Leadership Institute's seminar a couple years ago. We've been fortunate enough to go to Disney, fortunate or unfortunate, depending on who you ask, 4 times in the last 8 years. And I attended Disney Institute's Disney's Approach to Leadership Excellence. Got some notes here I'm going to go through and then just talk through some of the park experiences that I had there and how we can apply them to our payroll bureaus. In a way that will help us to create a better experience for our teammates, cast members, as they would call them at Disney, and our guests or our clients, and how we have applied some of these things in the past. So, let's go ahead and dive right in and talk about some of the things that are important to Disney when it comes to leadership. And, you know, right from the gate, I think there's this nice little chart in here in the, in the guide that they gave me that's the Leadership Chain of Excellence. And so it kind of, it shows this top-down approach of leadership excellence equals cast excellence, cast being the team, equals guest satisfaction, equals business results. And so they really take it seriously about how much it matters to have strong leaders and emphasize the point that it starts with you, but also that there should be leaders all over the organization, which we'll talk about in just a moment. They found a direct correlation between the leadership behaviors and the business results. As a matter of fact, in areas where cast members indicated they received effective coaching and feedback, guests perceived that cast members enjoyed making guests happy. So the guests saw the happiness level in the cast, and the cast were reporting that they were receiving high levels of coaching and feedback. So I wanna hit pause on that for just a moment. We all think about coaching as this thing where, you know, I'm here in South Carolina. I always use this image of Will Muschamp. He was a former football coach here, a pretty terrible one, but he, you know, was kind of known for busting a blood vessel in his head every time he'd be screaming at these poor kids out there playing football. And so I use that image of too often people get coaching hung up as this top-down approach of I'm gonna tell you what to do, you're gonna listen. My way or the highway. Whereas coaching is really about asking questions and unlocking the power and the energy inside of our teammates so that they can be the best version of themselves and so they can learn, right? So, when you leave a conversation after an effective coaching conversation, your head hurts a little bit because you're forced to think. Your leader is asking you powerful and impactful questions that force you to think and not just get answers regurgitated to you. And a couple of good resources for coaching. LinkedIn Learning actually has some really great— I completed about a 6-hour course through LinkedIn Learning last quarter. If you haven't leveraged LinkedIn Learning, I know here in our area, you can actually get a free LinkedIn Learning account with your library card membership, which there are just tens of thousands of really well-produced trainings in there. And it's definitely worth paying for and getting a team membership if you've got the budget. But if not, look into whether or not your local library sponsors free memberships, which I've taken advantage of. I think it's huge library, huge untapped resource in a bunch of ways. Also, for those of you looking to build out lists, most— our library also offers some prospecting tools as well for data scraping. So definitely something to look into. So when we talk about leadership excellence, leaders need to be great coaches. They need to make their cast members feel safe. They need to make sure that they feel like they're advancing in their careers. And that's going to help to improve business results and help to improve your client satisfaction overall. So for my money, as a leader, the best use of my time and energy each day is investing in the people around me to make sure that they get better. Because we have a mantra here, it's, it's, look, you're going to leave here better than you came here. We take it really seriously. We, we monitor training, we monitor performance, we monitor the amount of time. We try to be very intentional about giving coaching and feedback in the moment, because otherwise you get hung up in, in these sort of slow feedback loops that, that don't benefit anybody. So the next thing that they really focus a lot on is just the values vision of the organization. So making sure you've got defined values. And, you know, the, the example everybody goes to when we talk about values are companies like Enron, who had these generic values on the wall of integrity and all this, and, and then turned out to be a completely corrupt organization. So, when you think about your values and the habits that matter a lot to your organization, make sure they're well-defined. Make sure that they're things that you're going to be able to model and are easy to remember. And they're not just some plaque hanging in the front lobby. And one of the important points that they make at Disney about the role of values on the leadership team is that the personal values can't be misaligned with the organizational values. And so, there's some great ways to identify what are personal core values. And if you're listening to this, we've got a worksheet that we use with some of our clients. I'd be happy to fire over to you if you drop me a note. But I think that's a really important thing because oftentimes, when you see, you know, we're an HR organization, we help coach people up on HR issues. If I see a leader inside of a company with misaligned values, they tend to be really disruptive to the overall operation. Because if they disagree, you know, if they're the COO and the COO is trying to roll out some initiative and they undermine it in any way because their values don't align with organizational values, then it just becomes a big problem. So if somebody's personal values aren't aligning with your organizational values, or if you as an individual, your personal values don't align with the organization, you might want to rethink, you know, that individual or your specific stance and where that stands. So So defining the values, defining the vision, you know, having an ambitious view of the future that everyone can believe in and they understand and they can see clearly. You know, this, this is a big mistake a lot of companies make is not casting the vision and not frequently updating the vision. I just got off a call with an apparel bureau owner and we were talking about EOS. And, you know, once again, kind of drop me a note if you want to do a full episode on EOS, Entrepreneurial Operating System, based on the book Traction. But One of the things that process forces you to do from traction is to cast a vision 10 years, 3 years, 1 year, and then boil it down into 90-day goals. And I think that's really important because it— every quarter we're reviewing our 10-year vision with our employees. So nobody ever doesn't know where we're going. And we're even adjusting on the fly. And we've started to put dates around it so that it's not this kind of rolling thing that, that just keeps getting pushed out, pushed out, pushed out. But it also helps with employee retention. So if you're a 10-employee company today or a 2-employee company or a 25-employee company or whatever it is, 50-employee company, there's always a visible ceiling, right? So there's always a CEO or a manager or a vice president or somebody just above me or 2 layers above me or whatever it might be that to me represents my ceiling in the organization. And if people don't know you're going to be adding, you know, for us, we're going to be adding 15, 20 people over the next 3 years. That's going to create a lot of opportunities for people to either make lateral moves, make upward moves, grow inside their role, grow into senior levels of the role, grow into leadership management positions. It's important that people know that so that they know that they have more future possibilities inside the organization. And that's a part of having a great vision and understanding what that looks like and being able to share that in an environment that facilitates others' visions and values as well. So Definitely want to have a clear vision. And, you know, they, they, they talk a good bit. I just posted this on LinkedIn this morning about the 4 considerations of great leadership. So consideration 1 is passive versus proactive. So passive leaders don't establish, enforce, or demonstrate, which to me is really hyper-important, demonstrating the values. And so if you're going to have core values, and you're not going to connect the dots to them, you're not going to live them, you're not going to talk about them, you're not going to highlight them when others on your team live them out, then what the heck is the point? So great leaders proactively establish values. So they don't passively wait. You know, when I was writing my book, Ping Pong Is Not a Strategy: How to Create an Awesome Organizational Culture, one of the questions I asked each of the CEOs I interviewed for that book was, were you intentional about creating your culture? And to a person, they all emphatically said yes. So too often I see leaders say like, you know, the culture creates itself. Like we just hire great people and they're going to steer and create this great culture. It's just not true. You have to be intentional about creating the type of culture that you want. And another good book on culture is Tony Hsieh's Delivering Happiness. Rest in peace, Tony Hsieh. But definitely a good one when looking at creating a great culture. So great leaders proactively establish values. You want to be proactive versus passive. You want to be part of driving the, the values and mission and vision forward, not passive and hoping that it occurs. All right, so that's consideration number 1. Consideration 2 is inconsistent versus purposeful. So inconsistent leaders fail because they're too willing to change their values and too unwilling to change their vision. So it's like, I got this vision, it never changes, but my values might change in the short term to accommodate some sort of short-term goal or to take on some client or some new line of business. Like, you have to have those defined parameters around your vision and, and your values. So great leaders actively pursue changes required in the vision, but staunchly defend against potential threats to the values. So that's the piece that, you know, I highlighted as I look at this is just thinking about how often have you prioritized something as a value, but then there's something that maybe is a little, you know, a little on the edge of that value and you start to make concessions for, you know, whether it's to keep that client, to keep that key employee, to keep that, to get that new deal, to strike up that partnership. Well, always bites you in the butt somewhere down the road. So staunchly defend against potential threats to the values. Purposeful leaders also recognize that the vision is not— it can be changing, right? So one of the things about having a vision is that, you know, if you're casting a vision 5, 10 years in the future and you just will not bend on what that vision looks like, you're a maniac. Because how on earth can you predict what's going to happen 5, 10 years in the future, dude? Like, you've got to be flexible with how that is achieved. So flexible in your vision, but, uh, staunch in your values. And I think that's really important. So consideration to inconsistent versus purposeful leaders. And yeah, as you can hear, I'm flipping through this, and if you're watching the video, I'm literally just reading it out of context from, from the guide that I got out here. So you're getting my thousands and thousands of dollars worth of training, the CliffsNotes. Um, and but I definitely recommend it first and foremost. And the other thing is, I will say, as it relates to Disney's trainings during the pandemic, They started making some of their trainings available online, uh, for a couple hundred bucks. Whereas this, this particular course I went to, if I recall correctly, I believe it was $1,500, $2,000 for a one-day event. Uh, so definitely something to look into, uh, for a couple hundred bucks you can get access to, you know, leadership classes, onboarding, all sorts of fun stuff. So consideration 3, misaligned values versus aligned values. So we talked about it earlier, like You know, if the leader's values are misaligned with the organization, that's, that's just going to spell trouble for both parties involved. There should be an inherent interdependency between the leader's personal values and the organizational values. And for me, when I think about this, this goes to the hiring process. So during your behavioral interviews, you should be interviewing around your core values. Because for us, not only do we interview to our core values, but then we're, we're rating you during your performance assessments each quarter on how you execute versus those core values. Do you live them out daily? Is it visible? Is it something that you're, you're doing at a high level? And, you know, not to get too sidetracked on performance management, but, but going back to that frequency of coaching and feedback, you know, we do monthly plan and reviews with our employees where we sit down and review, you know, what are the big things on your plate right now? Um, what are you doing to personally develop yourself? How, how are things just going outside of all your projects? And, and anything that we might talk about on a regular, more frequent basis, this is your time for us to talk about your personal and career development. And then each quarter we do an assessment that says, hey, how are you trending against our core values and the outcomes that are expected from your role? And so that helps us to keep a, a really tight feedback loop. And what you'll find is over time that the answers almost always jive, right? So if I give you a 3 on your core value of teamwork makes the dream work and you give yourself a 5, then somewhere we've got misaligned and we need to have a conversation. And this forces us to have that conversation sooner than later. So consideration number 3, misaligned values versus aligned values. Consideration number 4, exclusive versus inclusive. So organizations that believe leadership can only happen at the top are missing out on an opportunity to create an environment that sustains vision and values. So everybody should be considered a leader because when you think about that, so now we've got our vision and values being propagated, being pushed forward from all levels of the organization regardless of size. So, this is a huge advantage to any organization that takes advantage of investing in leadership training and opportunities. So, some ways you can do this are beyond training, are allowing people to, you know, one of the things that we do, we rotate who leads our team meetings every week. We give folks an opportunity to lead trainings consistently. We give people the opportunity to own projects, rocks, things that are important to the organization and succeed or fail, but learn at every turn. And so I think that's an important thing to consider. And honestly, if you're not trying to grow more leaders, I mean, what's the point in having people on your team? And not that everybody needs to lead a team or be a manager, but people need to continue to grow and sometimes need to be pushed outside of their comfort level in order to do that. So, so a couple other things here as we go through this, you know, there was a lot of, you know, considering your strengths and opportunities as it relates to each of these. So, as I go through those 4, you know, where are my strengths when it comes to being proactive? You know, I create values and I communicate them regularly to my team. Well, where are some of my opportunities? Well, I want to demonstrate our values more consistently, particularly, you know, at the time, attention to detail was one of our core values. It's been switched up a little bit in just how we phrase that. But we also need to highlight opportunities for others. And, and that was a big thing for me as I kind of went through this. So, so go through each of those, rewind that, say, all right, of each of these 4 things— passive versus proactive, inconsistent versus consistent, misaligned versus aligned, exclusive versus inclusive— where do I have opportunities to grow as a leader? Really good opportunity to, to really help yourself to, to grow. Um, all right, so You know, one of the other big things that is important, I think, that we found and started to implement more when you look at some of this Disney training is giving people symbols and kind of a way to understand, like, recognition of things that we view as important. And so to keep on the Disney theme, we have a Buzz Lightyear doll that we give to employees typically once a quarter, but we don't set a time to it because we really want to make sure that it's not We're not just giving you the Buzz Lightyear doll because it's a quarter and somebody's got to get it. It's meant to have gone to infinity and beyond. So if the same person or same people who've been going to infinity and beyond the last quarter have already got it the last 3 quarters in a row, we're not just going to keep handing it out just to hand it out. I actually scooped up 5 new Buzz Lightyear dolls while I was down there so that I can have them ready for the next handful of quarters. But we want to make sure that, you know, we're really highlighting and emphasizing, and you can see a visual piece of what it looks like when somebody, when somebody is proactively living out the values of the organization. So, I think that's important because when you look at the different elements of your culture, you know, you've got the values, you've got the traits and behaviors, you've got heritage and traditions, and you've got language and symbols. So what are some of the things that you use as your internal vernacular that people should be familiar with on hire? So we actually created a little manual in our manual system of what are some of our language symbols, things that you should know around here. We continue to build on it. We talk about plus one a lot internally. So plus one means a lot of things. Plus one means going that extra mile for a client, proactively addressing and assessing what their next need might be. So one of the things we do with a new hire during training is say, okay, so let's review this response that you put together for this client. And now let's think, what is the next logical question this person could ask or next action they could take where another question might come from it? Or it can force you to cause an, or, or provide another resource that can help to solve any potential, you know, challenges they may have beyond this. So the example I always use, is you call into Verizon Wireless, you ask for some help, they help you solve the issue, you get off the phone, and then as soon as you click that button and go on to the next screen, there's a whole nother new set of questions that you don't know where to go next. And so they've actually minus one you, right? So they solve one problem, but they didn't plus one proactively address what the next obvious question is. So that's one version of a plus one for us. Another version of a plus one is, uh, you know, we really want to focus on serving the teammates internally first, right? So we want to plus one each other. So we are always looking for ways to overserve each other. But then also we look at it from a personal growth perspective. Are you growing? Are you suiting that need that we talked about earlier to leave here better than you came? And I'm always a little hesitant with that language because obviously we don't want any of our great teammates to leave. But in reality, that's life, right? People don't stay at jobs 30, 40 years anymore. And or they typically do not. And so we want to emphasize personal development, professional development, and creating well-rounded people in an environment that helps them to achieve their life's goals, you know, their personal values, their personal mission and vision, etc. All right. So they talk a good bit about what are their values. You know, their values are respect, integrity, openness, courage, honesty, diversity, and balance. And they have some Good little bullets around each of those. They talk about ways to vividly communicate your vision. And I think this is something once again is like that I've continued to struggle with over the years. It's easy to describe what you think the vision of the future looks like, but it's not easy to describe it in a way that's meaningful to others. It's kind of like the tapper and the listener. And I may have talked about this on the podcast before, but there's this old study they did with a tapper and a listener. So they have one tapper and one listener in each experiment, and the person is tapping out a song on the table, basic songs, Row, Row, Row Your Boat, Happy Birthday to You. And then the person on the other side of the table is supposed to guess which song they're tapping out.. And now what they do is they ask the individual who's tapping, what do you think the other person could tell what song you tapped out? And so I think it was like 80% of the time the tapper thinks that the other person can understand the song they're tapping out, whereas in reality it was only like 25% of the time they could actually understand the song they tapped out. So there's this big disparity in communication between what we see in our minds and how we're communicating things and how that's coming out versus how the other person is internalizing that information and then turning it into their own vision. So I say all that to say, communicating a vision is much easier with some visuals. So vision boards are a thing for a reason, right? So like having a vision board for your personal life, a lot of people familiar with it. I've got one. It's awesome. Love it. I don't update it enough for sure, but I still continue to, uh, um, look at it quite often. And I think having a vision board for your tenure is a really good idea. It's not something we do today. Like I said, I do it personally, but I think that's a really nice way to help to, you know, particularly like I'm always describing what our office will look like and, you know, how it'll be different from today's office and different things like that. And so I think that you could easily put together some visuals that would help your team to understand that and, and really see things a little bit more clearly. So, you know, lots of different conversations in here about vision and values, how to sustain it. You know, there's the erosion of values over time is something that will occur, particularly with hand-down and leadership. So, you want to make sure that the constant communication, action, and recognition of those values is something that you can continue to maintain consistency with. And it starts with us at the top, right? It's not something you can outsource. It's not something that you can depend on others for. And, you know, for you as a teammate, if you're not at the top, quote unquote, if you will, then you can certainly find ways to make sure that you're highlighting others who are showing off or who are showing your core values. So they do give a couple of ways that they sustain their shared values. They have meet and greets. So cast members at every level are encouraged to network and meet other cast members. So they have scheduled meetings with people in different roles to learn more about that function or department. So this is something we do as well. We make sure people book a 15-minute call with everybody in the company over the course of their first 30 days. You know, for some of you that are larger, I realize that might not be sustainable, but you could certainly make sure that they have at least 10 15-minute interviews, conversations geared up with teammates for these meet and greets. Job shadows, they are required to do quarterly in most departments, a half or full day just going and working with people in other departments to understand how that works. And this is something you go back to Zappos, Amazon, some of these other companies, they're pretty famous for people going through, like, regardless of role, you go through the same boot camp that starts kind of out on the warehouse floor. How do the shoes get boxed up? How do things get packaged? And kind of work your way back to your actual role. So definitely a great tool we can use. And how important is it for your salespeople to see how support works and support people to see how sales works? I mean, it just, it develops a level of empathy as well. One of the biggest challenges in the payroll and HR space is that you're eventually going to reach a point where these walls start to go up between finance, implementation, support, sales. Ops, like people start to create these, you know, organically and inorganically. And sometimes that turns, can really get heated. And so this is a great way, I think, to not only give people that empathy, but develop relationships across the aisle, if you will. Temporary assignments. So are specifically created positions to fill a temporary need in a department. And so basically what they'll do is loan people from one department to another. And, you know, give them the opportunity to plug in there to, to fill a role and help out that team, but also allow that person to develop in a new area. So that's interesting. On that same line, job rotation. So this is a common occurrence for leaders, particularly frontline operations. Every several years, leaders rotate to new lines of business, new parks, new resorts, and sometimes new cities depending on the role. So huge thing on just kind of moving folks around. I know when I worked at Fortune 500 companies, it was pretty— they're pretty adamant about changing leadership out every 2 years or rotating leaders into new departments, new cities, new business units, whatever it might be. You know, I could see the good and bad in that. It created— on the client success side, it created some inconsistencies for the end users, made some challenges there, but it certainly helped these people to develop in their career, and they became really valuable assets to the to the team over time. So definitely some great advice, something to emulate there in whatever way you can. So great leaders do not allow themselves to become separated from the occurrences on the front line. This is a challenging one, particularly as a midsize, if you will, as you continue to kind of move away from direct sales and direct support of the clients and move more into leadership. It can— you can actually get a bit of a disconnect from the clients. And so it's important to, you know, now that we're— I don't want to say post-COVID and jinx it, and we'll have an 18th strain coming through this weekend— but the, you know, now we can get back out, we do more face-to-face. You should be meeting with your clients, you should be listening to them, you should have a direct connection to your front line, you should pop into your customer support system and see what types of questions are being answered, what clients are frustrated, can you make a proactive call. They call this the leader walk, and you can kind of imagine this leader walking around the park in Disney and what that looks like. So, all right, just to wrap it up here, a big piece of the Disney leadership training was your leadership legacy. Every leader leaves a legacy. So it's going to be the aggregate of the story you tell over time. And that's an important thing. I think a lot of us get to the stage, particularly if you're a founder, where you've reached a point— I know this was critical for me— on what do I want my legacy to be? What do I want my life to be? And I think you need to think about that in the context of your professional life as well. Don't wait until the final years before retirement, the moments before you leave. Those aren't the times people are going to remember. They're going to think about what were— how did you treat them? Were you respectful? Were you fair? Um, you know, for me, I want people to know that I'm trustworthy, I'm caring, I'm committed, and I'm here to help them grow, and I have a genuine commitment to that. And, you know, you have to be really intentional about it. You have to think about it as a story that you're writing every single day, uh, because it's being written right now. And, and hopefully, you know, some of these leadership lessons were helpful to you. I know for me There's probably a whole other podcast on user experience of Disney and what they do differently to, you know, one of the key things I walked out of that park thinking is, you know, Disney is not a cheap place to go, right? But you pay a premium for a premium experience. So when we've got clients coming to us and they're going, ah, geez, you know, I can go get it from Gusto for $39.06, or I can, you know, do it on QuickBooks for this much. Do you want the Disney premium experience or do you want the budget motel pool with a slide experience? And how do you actually create that experience is the next step beyond that. Because it's one thing to say it and then, ooh, we're just more responsive and we're friendlier when you get us on the phone, but how do we actually dial that up and create a unique experience? And a fun exercise that we've done in the past that I recommend, um, this came from Airbnb, and I'm gonna butcher pieces of it, but the Airbnb leadership sat down with their team at one point and said, hey, you know, what's a, what's a level 5 experience look like? 5 out of 5, 5-star experience. And, you know, all right, well, let's dial back down. What does it look like a 1-star, 2-star, 3-star, 4-star Then they get to 5-star and 5-star is, oh geez, there was a bottle of wine waiting for me on the counter. It was easy to get in. My stay was great. The owner checked in with me to make sure everything was fine. I had a question, they answered it immediately. They booked me a reservation, whatever that 5-star amazing Airbnb experience is. And then they kept dialing it up. They said, all right, well, what's a 7-star? Well, how do we, I guess maybe they pick me up at the airport when I get there and then they had this ready and then they made those reservations. They made them at multiple places in case I wanted to go somewhere else. All right, well, well, that's 7 stars. What's a 9 star? They ultimately dialed it up to 11 and really had the team focus on if you could completely exceed expectations, what would that look like? And now you can start to pull some of those things out of what that 11 star, that 7 star, that 9 star experience look like for your client and help to emulate brands like Disney, Ritz-Carlton, Chick-fil-A is one that comes to mind. And those are the brands that we study that say, hey, how do they do things differently that command a premium dollar? Right? And nobody, you know, you don't— well, I don't go to Ritz-Carlton. I can't afford that. But you don't leave Disney and go, dang, that was so expensive. I got ripped off. Like, I can't believe it was that much. You're obviously not psyched that you just spent as much money as you spent, but at the same time, You get it because they've invested it into the experience. So as a takeaway from this episode, make sure you're doing, you know, not only internal assessments of where you're at as a leader, talk to your team about how you rank on each of these things, those 4 considerations we went through early on. Make sure that you're consistently sharing your vision and values and that they're clear and you can articulate them and you keep building visual into it., and then think a lot about how you can create an experience that's actually different from the competition. So I realize the bar is pretty low right now to beat the ADP Paychex Gustos of the world. Like, you know, they're not even returning phone calls. So, so that might seem that the bar is low, but these tides always turn. And the last thing you want is for somebody to come in and undercut you on price and be able to say, well, all you're doing is answering the phone. They told me they're going to answer the phone too. So what are you actually doing to separate yourself from the competition. Thanks for joining me today. If there's anything I can ever do to support you and the growth of your bureau, just gimme a shout. Appreciate you.